Taming Big Data with the Interactive Financial Statement Analysis Module

Big data refers to the amount of data a typical organization now processes to solve business problems.  This rapidly developing area is reshaping approaches to business education as has recently been discussed in Business Education Journals such as BizEd (November/December 2012).  For example, in their lead article “Where Technology meets Business” it was observed that:

 “… in today’s world, where everyone can buy databases, technology alone isn’t a competitive advantage.  The advantage rests in how an organization uses it. …. Tomorrow’s CEOs won’t need to connect wires and switches---but they will need to connect the dots…”

The Interactive Financial Statement Analysis (IFSA) is designed to meet these demands.  First, it provides immediate access to big data.  This data includes the interactive financial reports now required by the SEC from publicly listed corporations.  Second, IFSA combines big data with technology to provide the conceptual framework necessary for connecting the dots.  This conceptual framework steps you through a structured and visual approach to understanding a company from the financial data it generates.  These steps include:

·         Analyzing financial reports including the business model and strategy

·         Common Size Analysis (horizontal and vertical analysis)

·         Analyzing Profitability

·         Analyzing Operations

·         Analyzing Risk

·         Analyzing Reporting Quality

·         Analyzing price ratios to connect the dots between fundamentals and returns

Today’s business environment places increasing demands on the user to combine business analytics with big data because the sheer complexity of the problem forces a user to understand the underlying economic drivers of the data.  In the blogs on this site we illustrate how business analytics lets you work with big data to generate increasingly finer information.  For example, Understanding the Degree of Operating Leverage blog introduces you to the problem of analyzing operating risk.  This is the risk associated with operating leverage, measured by combining business analytics with the horizontal analysis of a corporation’s cost behavior.  The technology lets you pull of this analysis quickly for any publicly listed corporation and its competitors, but as the quote in the introduction asserts, the comparative advantage is not created from the database and the technology, but from knowing how to use this information.  The Interactive Financial Statement Module shows you how to acquire these skills -- by doing!